13 Ridiculous Reasons People Lost Their Jobs
by Benjamin Dzialdowski · BuzzFeedRecently, goldbeau asked r/AskReddit, "Who destroyed their own career within seconds by being an idiot?" And we thought we'd share some of the top results.
1. "One of the managers I worked with. He was visiting a company site in another country. He went to a strip club, and then onto a private room for a lap dance, whatever, etc. Because he was travelling on work business, he of course claimed these costs on a company expense claim. We never saw him again."
2. "One of the girls in the customer support team at a previous company."
"She got absolutely blotto at the Christmas party, did a full strip show on a tabletop in front of all staff and their partners. Got right down to the skin before anyone could yank her down. We came to work the following Monday and her desk was just gone. Not just personal items packed up in a box, but the entire desk had been dismantled and taken out of the CS area. Apparently the CS manager was so furious about the situation that he wanted to send a message that she wasn’t just fired, but was to be totally erased from company existence."
3. "This kid I worked with for a week at a sales job who tried to buy drugs off a customer because, and I quote, ‘I don’t know. They looked like they might have drugs.’ They did not have drugs. But they did have the number to corporate."
4. "The FBI agent who did the backflip in a bar, dropped his gun, grabbed it, negligently discharged it, someone was hit but lived, and he was arrested, prosecuted, and fired."
5. "A shop floor employee ended his 25-year career when he told his supervisor that he was ‘going home and getting my shotgun, and I’m going to show you how fucking serious I am’."
"He then proceeded to leave, at which point the police were called, and when he showed back up, he was arrested. And yeah, he had his loaded shotgun in the car. What was he so pissed about? That mandatory overtime coincided with the opening day of fishing season, and he wasn’t allowed to use PTO to go fishing. Well, he missed six opening days of fishing season for that one... because that’s how long he spent in prison."
6. "I was a second-year professor in physics when I flunked the starting centre from the university basketball team, even after a meeting with the athletic director, the dean, my department head, and the university president. I ‘stuck to my guns’. They laid me off four months later, and I had to become a programmer."
7. "That executive at Campbells for saying that their food is for poor people while someone was recording."
8. "The people on the Coldplay 'kiss cam'.”
9. "That lady who got a job at NASA & tweeted at the National Space Council overseer to 'suck my dick and balls'."
10. "A deputy I knew was at his graduation party. Tradition is to invite the training staff, who usually only stay for a few hours, so the new deputies can let off some steam. This ding-dong decided to moon the staff and their spouses. He forgot he was on a one-year probation after graduation. He was fired."
11. "I was one of 10 first-year associates at a large accounting firm. At the end of our first week, the firm had an end-of-busy-season party for the 4,000 employees in our office. Live band, free booze. One of the guys I started with got drunk and somehow ended up on the dance floor with the wife of our managing partner. We all got sent off for two weeks of training, but after we got back, we never heard from the guy again."
12. "One of my old coworkers made a bed on a flatbed cart and got caught sleeping on it by the boss three levels over our boss because she was touring the facility. When you get fired from the state... you are sanctioned from ever working there again. Last time I heard, he's working at a warehouse now for much less money."
13. "I work as a firefighter paramedic."
"A couple of EMTs I worked with went to paramedic school and got fired and had their licences revoked by the state for forging signatures on their paperwork. They had to get signatures verifying the hours they worked from the hospital staff where they did clinical practice, and a few of them forgot to get some signatures.
They got caught because an instructor found a sheet of paper one of them accidentally turned in with some other papers where they had been practising said signatures. What’s super dumb is that they did the hours, they just forgot the signatures.
All it would have taken was a call to the hospital clinical coordinator and the papers could have been signed properly. But they decided to forge it, and they lost their jobs over it. They’ll also never work anywhere as firefighters or EMTs or paramedics because it’s basically impossible to get certified again if any state revokes your cards."
H/T to goldbeau and r/AskReddit for having the discussion!
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Additional thumbnail credits: Sony Pictures Releasing